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Reviewing Del Posto

By Sam Sifton September 28, 2010 4:23 pmSeptember 28, 2010 4:23 pm

This week’s restaurant review is my first four-star outing since I took over the position of restaurant critic: Del Posto, the Italianate restaurant on Tenth Avenue and 16th Street that Mario Batali, Joe Bastianich and Lidia Bastianich opened in 2005. It received a three-star rating in 2006 from my predecessor, Frank Bruni.

The distance between three and four stars is at once huge and infinitesimal. It goes to both intent and execution. Del Posto was absolutely a three-star restaurant when it opened under the chef Mark Ladner, who had run the kitchen at Lupa in Greenwich Village, and who is a partner in Otto, both of which are part of the Batali-Bastianich empire. And now it is a four-star one, with Mr. Ladner still in charge of the kitchen. A reader might well wonder: What happened in the intervening years?

A lot. A three-star restaurant may be a four-star one that fails to make the argument, or a two-star restaurant that is punching extremely hard for its weight. But a four-star restaurant wants to be that; it wants to sit at the intersection of luxury and abandon. It cannot get there by accident.

I’ve been eating at Del Posto since the start, and have watched as it gained its legs and learned to walk, then as it stumbled a little in toddlerhood, and now as it has risen into adulthood. I saw it approach its ranking slowly, and lately with great intent.

A year ago, just about the time I took over this beat, Del Posto woke up one day to discover that it had been stripped of a star in the 2010 edition of the Michelin guide to New York City restaurants. Whatever you think of the Michelin guide, the news served as a wake-up call, Mr. Ladner said when I talked to him on the telephone last week. The bosses promptly reorganized the restaurant’s front-of-house operations.

Mr. Ladner hired a new pastry chef, Brooks Headley. And, for his own part, he said he started cooking more himself, taking on responsibility for all the restaurant’s menus, something he had partly ceded in the past to sous chefs. “Once I started to do the creating,” he said in the interview, “the menu started to make sense to me. It started to cohere.”

Mr. Ladner and Mr. Headley have lately been collaborating on some videos about Del Posto and the work they do there. They reveal a couple of artists at work: Mr. Ladner in his extremely large glasses, and Mr. Headley with his quiet, rock-drummer mien, as if he had just awakened on your couch, the fourth morning in a row.

In the meantime, we welcome your comments, the line for which is below. Del Posto is the first Italian restaurant to receive a four-star ranking in The Times since John Canaday’s review of Parioli Romanissimo in 1974.